Presenting UX Research findings more effectively
4 Tips on how to communicate the research findings with impact
A couple of years ago I took the task of introducing research practices into our development cycle. In my opinion, choosing the right methods isn’t the most tricky part. But sharing the findings with the stakeholders.
Communicating insights at the right time and with the most impact is the key to putting into practice the research you have done.
After you did the hard work of conducting the interviews, testing, analyzing and synthesizing the results, it’s time to show off your work. Whether you are communicating through a report, live presentation, email or a post on a dedicated work channel, here are suggestions to pass on insights with impact.
1. Define your audience
Tailor your presentation to your audience and set a goal upfront by answering these 2 questions:
- How and which part of research insights can be relevant to your audience?
- What do you need them to know or do?
To find the right narrative you should know how listeners interpret the data. What terminology are they familiar with and how do they want to receive the data.
Using your research findings, tell a story tailored to your audience. You can base your narrative on this structure: objectives, findings and outcomes
Objectives:
What are the objectives of this study? What is the current state? What do we want to achieve? What methods did you use and how did we collect our data.
Findings:
What are users’ answers to the in-depth interview questions? What are the results of usability tasks with a prototype or live product?
Outcomes:
What are the recommended actions on how the team can address discovered issues?
2. Summarize
Make rich feedback digestible
Don’t show your audience the raw data. Summarize your findings. Translate them into a digestible story. Share the source files if someone wants to dig into it deeper.
Combine quantitative with qualitative data
Show the key insights with supporting information. This could be showing a CSAT score with user observation or a quote about a specific pain point or user need.
3. Make it engaging
Go to the point
Write concisely, from page titles to the screenshot descriptions.
Make them curious
Make your presentation interactive. You can start with a question referring to a UX problem. Ask your team about their assumptions on a given topic, then show the data.
Find out what they would like to hear about from your users. What are the topics they would like to give more attention to and most importantly: why? Basically, it’s like research within research, a meta-research? :)
At the end, when you show action points based on presented insights, you can dedicate some time to a discussion and brainstorming.
Help to empathize
One of the goals of sharing the research is to improve the empathy with our users. How can we bring the voice of your customer and/or users to our teams? Make everyone see firsthand how people use your product. If you can’t invite stakeholders to the user interviews, let them see the sneak peek of the usability session registration. Or show videos of how real users interact with the product. Some platforms allow forwarding the registrations directly into Slack channels. That can make life a little easier. After all, nothing gives such trills like watching certain unmoderated user sessions.
Add some humour
Weave humour into your presentation to make it even more engaging. All the rules of the winning presentation apply to presenting research findings. There are plenty of opportunities for making the recap of usability sessions much more thrilling than many other quarterly presentations (e.g. budget reviews). Sometimes watching users trying to complete a task is as much exciting as watching an action movie! Hotjar, a tool for Behavior Analytics & Feedback Data, demonstrates to know well these movie references. Their microcopy reads ‘rolling the red carpet’, ‘popping out the pop corn’ or ‘dimming the lights.’
4. Make it actionable
A To-do list
Include a brief summary at the end and write a To-do list. Offer actionable recommendations, not opinions. If you are talking to participants, conducting tests, and analyzing the results, you are qualified to suggest the direction. This could be an additional exploration or design work to consider.
Share
Share your slide deck after pitching it to the stakeholders. Put a link to the interview script or a task scenario and all the raw data.
Create a research repository. If you are thinking about how to store user research findings, I recommend taking a look at the Polaris — an atomic research approach. Polaris created by Benjamin Gadbaw and Tomer Sharon is like a design system for research where each observation is stored, tagged and supported by evidence in an easily searchable database.
…and remind
Research is most effective when we can bring relevant findings to the attention of the team during the daily design discussions, demos, kick-off meetings etc
Final thoughts — The attitude
One of my biggest successes in communicating users’ needs was when I convinced my brother to invest all his savings in a stupendous red Ferrari. At that time we were about six years old and my Barbie doll really, but really, needed that car. Joking apart. At that time, collecting our pocket money to finally buy that dreamed toy was quite a big event and my negotiation style was quite passionate. So, if you advocate for users needs with a sincere interest and have solid data, your audience will see it.
Additional Resources
On effective storytelling with data, from choosing the right graph to leveraging conflict and tension to maintain your audience’s attention, I highly suggest reading Storytelling with data — a data visualization guide for business professionals by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
The atomic research approach, how to define, tag and make the research observation easy to find: https://tsharon.medium.com/the-atomic-unit-of-a-research-insight-7bf13ec8fabe
Presentation template https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1N8qpXAMiwi-yYEneIZFCBy1_kqQ7KWE1dwSUPRsq948/edit#slide=id.gbe52e0d807_1_204
More templates for organizing feedback, test results etc https://uxdesign.cc/usability-testing-templates-9b79b40eb481
….and another 30 templates https://www.userinterviews.com/blog/ux-research-presentations-reports-templates-examples
